"Meet the economist who figured out that legal abortion was behind dropping crime rates" burbles Steven E. Landsburg on the Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal.com site. Yes, it's more hype for Steven D. Levitt's new book Freakonomics. Landsburg writes:
Back in 1999, Mr. Levitt was trying to figure out why crime rates had fallen so dramatically in the previous decade. He was struck by the fact that crime began falling nationwide just 18 years after the Supreme Court effectively legalized abortion. He was struck harder by the fact that in five states crime began falling three years earlier than it did everywhere else. These were exactly the five states that had legalized abortion three years before Roe v. Wade.
Did crime fall because hundreds of thousands of prospective criminals had been aborted? Once again, the pattern by itself is not conclusive, but once again Mr. Levitt piles pattern on pattern until the evidence overwhelms you. The bottom line? Legalized abortion was the single biggest factor in bringing the crime wave of the 1980s to a screeching halt.
I first debated with Levitt over whether legalized abortion cut crime way back in Slate.com in 1999. My new article in the May 9, 2005 edition of The American Conservative (available to electronic subscribers this weekend) punches a big hole in Levitt's abortion-cut-crime theory. Here's a brief excerpt:
"According to Levitt's logic, murder should have declined first among the youngest and last among the oldest. Did it?
"Unfortunately for Levitt, the opposite is true. The murder rate for Americans age 25 and over started falling way back in 1981 (when the youngest person in this cohort was born in 1956) and fell fairly steadily for two decades. Indeed, in contrast to his theory about post-Roe individuals being especially law-abiding, the adult murder rate has only begun to creep back up now that people born after Roe have begun to make up a noticeable fraction of those 25 and up. From 1999 through 2002 (the latest year available, when a 25 year old would have born four years after Roe), the murder rate among 25-34 year olds has risen 17 percent, while continuing to drop among the under 25s.
"But the acid test of Levitt's theory is this: Did the first New, Improved Generation culled by legalized abortion actually grow up to be more lawful teenagers than the last generation born before legalization?
"Hardly. Instead, the first cohort to survive legalized abortion went on the worst youth murder spree in American history.
"Abortion became legal in 1970 in California, New York, and three minor states, and was legalized in the other 45 states in 1973 by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade. Let's compare the murder rate of 14-17 year olds in 1983 (who were born in the last pre-legalization years of 1965-1969) with that of 14-17 years olds a decade later in 1993 (who were born in the high-abortion years of 1975-1979).
"Was this post-Roe cohort better behaved than their pre-legalization elders? Not exactly. Their murder rate was 3.1 times worse.
"In contrast, 18-24 year olds in 1993 (some born before legalization, some after) committed 86 percent more murders than a decade earlier, while people 25 and up (all born before legalization) were 18 percent _less_ lethal.
Back in 1983, 14-17 year olds were barely more than half has likely as 25-34 years olds to kill. In 1993 and 1994, however, this purportedly better-bred generation of juveniles was more than twice as deadly as 25-34 year olds."
A lot of naive reviewers like Landsburg are going to make fools out of themselves because Levitt and Dubner failed to mention any of these massive problems with Levitt's theory in their book Freakonomics. To get the full story on how legalizing abortion might even have caused the murder rate to go up, get the May 9th edition of The American Conservative.
Graphs from upcoming article are now online at: http://isteve.blogspot.com/2005/04/abortion-crime-graphs-steven-d-levitt.html
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
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2 comments:
Actually he did not say that murder went down, he said crime rates went down. These are not the same at all. The truth is that murder is one crime, not all of them.
Regardless of there being any truth to the idea that abortion reduced (or did not reduce) crime rates on the whole (I think it had an effect, but so did a lot of other things)), the argument made was for *all* crime, not just murder. Your example is for *just* murder, which switches topics entirely.
You cannot successfully refute an argument by answering a different question than the one being examined. This is called 'begging the question'. You do not get to state a different question and then answer THAT one, or redefine the terms being used and then create an answers which mixes both sets of definitions. That is simply deception. Yes it is common, but it is not the way to search for facts.
For example. you cannot prove anything about cervical cancer rates, by arguing back about the rates of diabetes. Apples and Oranges. You switched from "all crime" to "murder".
I am aware that politicians do this all the time, but it is still "dancing a sidestep". It is still deception.
I do not know what the truth is in this area, and frankly I find it difficult to believe that anyone to be accurate in the debate at all (regardless of which of the two main sides they favor) becasue a HUGE number of factors contribute to different types of crimes in different locations. Besides which, crime is a shifting definition, not a single one.
We must always remember that crime is a human invention, a criminal is a person who has committed a crime, been caught and convicted of that crime. They fit a human definition that is forever shifting because our laws are always shifting. The people who commit crimes are the result of what we define as crimes, and those who get convicted are the result of a huge number of factors; everything from cultureal misunderstandings, to racial and religious bias plas a large part in who gets convicted of what. The quality of the system that is in place plays a large part as well. All of this mess is generated as a side effect of the laws that people pass.
We must remember that these laws are not sacrosanct, but are passed into law by people, not because they are a good idea, or because they are sensible or enforceable. Bills (for public referendum or for our representatives) are created in a reactionary environemnt, usually to cater in a simplistic way to pubic fears, to public mis-perceptions about complicated problems. They rarely approach problems in a way that will work.
Most of the the time the winner of a public referendum vote is whichever sides spent the most money on the biggest advertising campaign. Politics is about marketing, not about the truth.
This brings me back to crime statistics. Most of them ae not trustworthy. They are created by people who have an agenda, an outcome that they WANT to see. That is not how you get the truth. Every set of crime statistics was complied for a reason,. and that reason is very rarely a quest for the facts 'whatever they may be'.
Current governments want proof for their favorite fear cards, and they want to prove that their actions are helping. Those against the current government try to use statistics to prove their standpoint.
- continued -
As a person who has lived in more than one country, one thing I find it very interesting that people of all political persuasions seem to be drawn so very much to same methods of deceit (the same shell games).
* When faced with facts, immediately change the topic, or the definitions in use
* try casting dispersion on the character of those who say thing things you do not like.
* If ‘these fail you, then try more direct name calling
* When all else fails you can always play the fear card again with a nonsensical with round of “won’t somebody think about the children”.
I also find it interesting how often those governments who most loudly claim to be representing their people, completely fail to listen to their people in favor of doing whatever those in charge are obsessed with doing, even if their own experts disagree.
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